History
The mailing list was created in 1992 on a public Unix system by Andy Hawks, then in high school. After a fallout with the rest of the group, Andy destroyed the list of members early 1993 and took the list off-line. Various subscribers have since continued the Future Culture list at a different address and the list moved from nyx.cs.du.edu, ending up on the UAFSYSB mainframe (fondly remembered as "list dad") at the University of Arkansas under the care of Alias Datura ("list mom"). See here for a brief overview of the early days of Future Culture.
Andy Hawk's original Future Culture Manifesto, also known as the Bubble Manifesto, can be considered to be an historical document reflecting the state of mind at the dawn of the Internet, specifically the aspect of "virtual culture". This document refers to key movements in the early 1990s that have led to – and have strongly influenced – how society thinks about and uses technology and specifically the internet.
The pre-corporate Internet was envisioned as a place of massive movement of thought; the manifesto documents this and approaches the ideas of transformation: from an economic-based world to an ideas-based world. As it turned out, this did not happen, but the idea was documented here and referred to repeatedly in a variety of different media, especially by academics working in Internet-related fields of study. (cf MIT Media Lab (mediaMOO), as well as a variety of people working under the general rubric of PostModernism.)
Although many of the Future Culture list were vehemently opposed to making the archives of their postings publicly available, a selection of the emails that were exchanged during the initial period found their way to the web. These archived messages give a good impression of the topics that were typically discussed.
An indication for the popularity of Future Culture during its hey-days, is that the group was mentioned on Billy Idol's album Cyberpunk.
A document listing a variety of influences this mailing list has had on other groups or that carry on in the same memespace is found on Marius Watz' FutureCulture page. This page also serves as a link to a memorial for Michael Current, who was among the most active members. His death was a huge shock for the Future Culture community. An in-depth coverage of the events leading up his death, a hoax suicide threat, and the painful aftermath has been written by a Future Culture's member. This sad event was also an inspiration for Mia Lipner's sound art piece Requiem Digitatem
FutureCulture had part in 'liberating' the William Gibson work Agrippa: A Book of the Dead.
The list has been mentioned in at least two books introducing the reader to the world of cyber cultures, Victor J. Vitanza's CyberReader 2/e, "an anthology of readings on the new technologies and their impact on social and individual identities" and in Jonathan Marshall's ethnography of the mailing list Cybermind, Living on Cybermind
It is mentioned as "landmark event" by Andrew Edmond in his article "Pioneers of the Virtual Underground: A History of our Culture" in issue 1, 1997 of The Resonance Project.
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Famous quotes containing the word history:
“The history of all countries shows that the working class exclusively by its own effort is able to develop only trade-union consciousness.”
—Vladimir Ilyich Lenin (1870–1924)
“We don’t know when our name came into being or how some distant ancestor acquired it. We don’t understand our name at all, we don’t know its history and yet we bear it with exalted fidelity, we merge with it, we like it, we are ridiculously proud of it as if we had thought it up ourselves in a moment of brilliant inspiration.”
—Milan Kundera (b. 1929)
“Tell me of the height of the mountains of the moon, or of the diameter of space, and I may believe you, but of the secret history of the Almighty, and I shall pronounce thee mad.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)